Star Wars: The Last of the Jedi, Volume 4 by Jude Watson Read Free Book Online Page B

and locked. Within seconds, they were wheeling Ferus out.
    He clutched a restraining bolt in his fingers—the bolt that Clive had passed him when he’d pretended to attack him. He had no idea what to do with it. It was hardly a weapon. But it
was something.
    Ferus was thrown into a cell. His execution order was read out loud to him. “By the order of…” “Crimes against the Imperial regime…” It
didn’t matter.
    The door locked behind the guards. It was a tiny cell with thick durasteel walls. There was no room to lie down and barely room to sit. There was no window, no chair. Nothing here but time, and
very little of that.
    He grasped the bolt in his fist. He couldn’t break out of here with a bolt. Clive knew that. But when they came for him, when they took him to the execution room, then maybe he could use
it.
    You put a small object in a piece of equipment in the right way, you can disable it. Disable something, you’ve got a distraction. Sometimes that’s all you need.
    All in all, he’d rather have a lightsaber.
    Already he heard them coming. They didn’t let you sit for long.
    He still had the Force. It was here, even on this stinking, dismal planet, even in this dark cage of a room. It was inside him and around him and he could access it whenever he chose.
    He stood.
    Today he would either die or escape.
    It would be his choice. Not theirs.
    The door slid open. There were six stormtroopers. One was an officer, consulting a datapad attached to his wrist.
    “Ferus Olin, criminal from the planet Bellassa. Retinal scan.” He held up a scanner to Ferus’s eye. “Identification confirmed.”
    They pushed him into another room, a larger one, with several chairs with restraints that were bolted to the ceiling and trailed down like lethal vines. There was a med droid in the corner. So
it would be lethal injection.
    They pushed him past the droid. He palmed the restraining bolt as he passed. He hoped the guards would keep shoving him, and they did, poking him with their blaster rifles. He pretended to
stumble and reached out with an arm to steady himself. He grabbed on to the med droid.
    “Off!” The stormtrooper slammed the butt of the rifle into his shoulder.
    The pain radiated down Ferus’s arm. It didn’t matter. He’d been able to slip the bolt into the droid’s socket.
    They brought him toward the chair, then slammed him down into it.
    “Prepare injection,” the officer said.
    The droid didn’t move.
    “Prepare injection!” the officer snapped.
    “Restrained,” the droid answered succinctly.
    “What?”
    The officer turned. It was the moment Ferus had been waiting for. With one kick he sent one stormtrooper into another; an elbow sent a third spinning. The Force hummed around him as he leaped
over the pile, snatching up two blasters on the way. He twisted in midair, held himself motionless for one instant to blast the droid to smithereens, then landed. He dived away from blaster fire
and used the momentum to roll himself like a ball, taking down the rest of the stormtroopers. On his way up he grabbed a security card out of a stormtrooper’s utility belt.
    The officer faced him, his blaster held steady.
    Ferus held his blasters. Neither of them moved.
    The officer fired. Ferus had already taken advantage of the instant before the blast and leaped. He fired above at the ceiling. The bolts holding the restraints in place fell. The restraining
cables dropped to the floor. He wrapped the officer in them and fled.
    Since he’d been in the restraint box, he wasn’t sure where he was in the prison complex. He would have to find the factory. He wasn’t sure if Clive had been able to disable the
loader but he had to assume that the plan was on schedule. Clive would expect him to show up. If he didn’t, he had no doubt that Clive would leave without him…if he could.
    Ferus ran through the halls. There had to be another entrance to the factory, one for the guards to use.
    He found it.